


Human

by Lue4028



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: John Watson - Freeform, Johnlock - Freeform, M/M, Merlock, Sherlock - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-26
Updated: 2016-07-16
Packaged: 2018-03-19 19:30:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 8,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3621597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lue4028/pseuds/Lue4028
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the midst of a droll and lonesome existence, Sherlock discovers himself a new pet, that he occasionally abuses but loves very dearly. [Merlock]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

                                                      

A dark-haired mermaid lounges drearily on the sea floor, arms outstretched, tail dusting the sand, and stares up into the undulating patterns of diffraction criss-crossing on the surface. The light sweeps over his pale skin, bathing him in strips of alternating brightness and darkness. He closes his eyes and listens the static in his ears, fringe sifting idly above his black lashes in the vague current.

Then he hears a splash, and his electric green eyes dart to a plume of white twenty meters above, disturbing the placid face of the ocean. The source of the excitement is a rapid manoeuvre of the caudal fin of a great white, its light silhouette circling in the shallow depths. He lifts off the floor in a swift arc of motion and ventures toward the predator with energetic, powerful thrusts, until he is close enough to identify what has sparked the shark's interest.

He sees that it is a drowned human corpse, covered in fabric, probably fallen victim to the riptide. The creature gapes gleefully at his luck and shoots in front of the shark, snagging the specimen before the curious carnivore can take a chunk out of it. He braces his arms around the chest of the body, which, as he inhales against its skull, smells delightfully fresh, and plunges downward to evade the nosy great white. The creature quickly discovers how drastically the body slows his speed and that he can’t possibly outpace a shark with it in tow, so he spirals around menacingly with a deft swerve of tail, growling at the toothy monster, and kicks its nose in a threatening flounce. The shark veers off in an askance direction, and drifts further away, seemingly deterred from its investigation.

The chimera smirks to himself and settles on the floor with his newly-won trophy, a circle of dust unfurling around them. He cups the cadaver with a forearm beneath the shoulder blades and rests its back against the sand delicately, taking in its bland features. He absently trails his thumb under its blanched lip as he contemplates, thoroughly mesmerized, tail curving around and thumping against the sand contently.

The human looks peaceful in death, with long, silky waves of greyish, sunlight-coloured hair that drift above his forehead. He has a guarded, reserved face—a square, set jaw that doesn’t give beneath the merperson’s touch, and trim lips that are flush with dusky pink colour, set against his overall deathly pallor.

The brunet parts his lips and runs a thumb over the line of incisors, marvelling at the sad state of his canines— almost non-existently small and only in one set, while the merperson knows himself have eight and four additional smaller ones, and the wounded shark overhead to wield well over three-hundred.

The brunet sniffs blood and suddenly the shark comes crashing down beside them with a gaping, ribbed mouth, swiping a bite. He reflexively withdraws the human specimen into his chest and hisses in annoyance, cradling the scalp in his fingers. Then with a powerful thrash, the mythical creature takes off furiously with his human in his arms and breaks the surface. He looks down through the glassy seawater and narrows his eyes at the archaic fish circling beneath them.

This is the solitary occasion on which brunet has had the chance of examining such a pristinely preserved human body, he’s not liable to just let the daft creature eat it. Keeping his human clutched to his chest, his dim, sun-lit irises skim over the horizon and locate a nearby patch of land emanating from the island. He delves down into the wake, his tail bottoming up with a curtain of trailing water and flopping down into the distorted, crystal blue water. He reemerges shortly after in the shallow region of the tide, his torso and the upper part of his tail exposed to the open air. He leers at the foreign terrain, squinting his glowing eyes, one arm rung around the prone, outstretched body, the other locked and supporting his weight.

The merperson drags the body up the shore until the sand is dry and scalding white. Encroaching waves only reach to the base of his trunk, circling about his tailfin, and the nuisance shark could only reach them if it wanted to beach itself. The sun is blinding and disdainfully harsh on his fair skin.

The amphibian lays his head on the cool grain and watches his hard-earned cadaver, the drying wind twitching in its sun-bleached hair. Amidst the sultry heatwaves and the incredible stroke of luck, the merperson begins to feel like the derelict figure before him is a mirage, a little too good to be true. 

Suddenly human jerks to sitting and brunet jolts up startled. As it hacks away, coughing up fluid, the brunet’s expression reverts from a state of shock to that of annoyance. He looks back at the sea, his tail flapping impatiently, considering re-drowning the human.

After a moments thought, the chimera bristles, overcome by aversion for the species, and resolves to simply leave the man there in his coughing fit. He gives the sand a push and swerves, fins slithering in an arc behind him as he crawls back through the shallow water. He wades in several feet and sinks in, tail flashing reflectively. 


	2. Chapter 2

The chimera watches in the shallows as the human recovers, gradually gets his bearings. The man slowly starts to panic for some unknown cause, skirting the beach, searching for god knows what, threading his fingers in his hair. By the time his rounded the beach for the third time, he takes notice of the brunet seeping beneath the water, submerged to just below his eyes. He pauses in midstep and blinks his dark blue eyes, registering of the presence of a head of brown curls amongst the expanse of seascape.

“H-hey,” he says, catching the amphibian’s dull yellow gaze. “Hey. Hello,” he breathes with a weary smile, “You’re a.. another person. Oh thank God. I think I’m uh. Lost. Do you think you could help me out and point me in the direction of civilization, maybe one with a… phone?”

A growl rumbles from the creature’s throat as the human takes a few steps toward him, toes kissing the waves. The creature’s shoulders rise with tension and his fingers claw the sand.

“My name is John. John Watson? Do you have any idea where—“ the man trespasses knee-deep into the water, and the chimera releases an hostile, threatened growl, clenching his canines, flaring his bioluminescent green irises at the intruder. John sees the silver tail whiplash beneath the surface and falls back on his haunches, chest heaving with rapid breath, his pupils dilated and his heels digging into the cemented sand. Fear. Good. It’s mutual.

Without easing his glare, the merperson pivots on the palm of his hand and dives back into the water, vanishing beneath the cover of seawater. 


	3. Chapter 3

After combing through every inch of the extremities of the island for the so much as a shred of human civilization and a brief encounter with a creature he is partly convinced he hallucinated, John reawakens the next day to find himself still stranded on the chaparral island. After brief moment lamenting what he remembers of the events that put him there, he sighs heavily through his nose and resolves to utilize the daylight for gathering extendible material to light a beacon.

He blinks and scrubs his eyes against the cool mist, then, coming off his sore shoulder with a groan, tries to divest himself of the sand caking his seasalt-stiffened shirt. He rubs his neck and turns his gaze to the ocean, grey and still in the breaking dawn, devoid of any immediate signs of any mythological inhabitants.

He watches the quiet ebb and flow of the tide, suspiciously scanning the rocks of the continental shelf, and looks for any unnatural disturbances in the water. Despite ripples of underwater kelp forests and the occasional collision where water meets stone, little else penetrates the surface. After a few minutes of nothing particularly remarkable happening, he stands, turns, and heads into the brush.

He starts gleaning through the nearby flora, composed namely of out-fanning palm trees and dense shrubbery. He garners several dead and dormant shrubs, a bundle of shattered bark planks, and a few splinters. He treads back and forth between the shore and the forested terrain until, having expended most of the nearby material, he returns to the beach.

He covers the foliage with the heavier material to avoid it blowing away in the ocean breeze. Then, with a quick once-over on the ocean again, he sees the surface has adopted a translucent turquoise sheen under the daytime and vanishing cloud cover, and notes a few gulls flying high in troposphere, disinterested in his minuscule island of death.

He rolls up his sleeves and decides to set to work on the driftwood several yards downwind on the shore, which he hopes isn’t shipwreck, for the unnerving message that sends anyway.

As he strides barefoot on wet, compacted sand and lapping water, he perhaps irrationally maintains an almost careful distance from greater depths. He sets down beside the debris and collects a suitable armful to carry. He rises to his feet, and takes a few steps before he halts in his tracks. His skin crawls with the feeling that he’s being watched, so he tenuously looks up, trained eyes running over the mountain range of searock.

Sure enough he is. The creature is posed on one of the mid-distant rocks, presiding over his actions with a sort of majestic nonchalance, arms leaning against basalt rock. Its tail is so long it curves over the edge of the platform and thumps idly against the side slope, mixing the water. John glances for a moment, then shakes his head, peeved with his treacherous brain. Gathering up the fragments of his crazed and delirious mind, he executively reverts his eyes to the task at hand and resolves to mind his own.

Upon dropping the load by the growing pile of combustables, he ventures a glance back at the seascape. The creature, still surveying his labors, brazenly returns his gaze in silence. Its demeanor exudes the feeling of almost haughty arrogance, the way it so boldly meets his eyes and basks flamboyantly on its throne of bedrock, not feeling obligated to explain its proximity. John looks away, removing his cursory gaze before it becomes an incautious stare, and repeats his trek down the shoreline to gather more driftwood.

John supposes that it’s technically a mermaid like those visualized in legends, with the upper body of a human and the finned tail of a beast. But when John thinks mermaid, he thinks of   Disney’s   little mermaid, adorable, sing-song, nonthreatening, not this creature with glowing green eyes and metallic scales and canines that could tear a person apart. The way it lurks in darkness, obscured by the depths, vanishing in and out of visibility, is like something out of   Jaws , rather. In light of its unpredictably terrifying nature, John feels a more befitting title would be sea monster.

But that is not to say it isn't beautiful.

As he ambles downwind in the pursuit of more shipwreck material, trying to balance on a trail of step stones to a further patch of shoreline, he looks again. This time he doesn’t feel quite so hurried to look away, because it’s obvious the creature has made the greater transgression, still staring at him like that, always staring at him like that.

His eyes once-over its striking figure and sharp tailfins in appraisal. He scoffs amusedly with a cockiness that rivals the creature’s own, and resumes his ministrations, accumulating wood. But as he carries on down the beach, he feels the urge to look again, and this time he takes a good look.

His part-coy-part-not stare runs over its lioness pose, with arms beneath its torso, all white skin. Its lower body rests against the rock the way a woman might sit on a picnic blanket, legs bent aside, flank tilted up against the press of cement so that the curve of hipbone becomes pronounced. And somehow, despite the distance he has put between them, John can see its supernatural green eyes leering at him, varying in intensity like starlight. The creature is terrifying, granted, but also extremely beautiful. Realizing that he’s having difficulty breathing, John looks away and closes his mouth.

John salvages the wood and turns back. Every time he pauses or takes a break on his journey back to the stock pile, his eyes drift curiously back to lion lounging on its pedestal. It calmly watches him back, green penetrating the darkness of its fringe, stark against its porcelain skin. What he finds so addicting to watch is something he can’t really isolate, it might be the concatenation of its eerie exotic features, fixated on him. It’s beautiful, horribly beautiful.

The staring, which John had thought was harmless at first, begins to feel almost like flirting- the gall with which they stare at each other at such close range without breaking the static silence. He begins to think about the creature even when he’s not looking at it, and starts having difficulty tearing his eyes away. Before he knows it, its constant watch is making it difficult to perform his facile task, or even think. He thoughts are tangled by the creature, beautiful, horribly beautiful, all-consuming, breath-stopping, frustratingly inescapable beautiful.

As John journeys back and forth, doing his work, their back-and-forth grows increasingly more frequent, and John supposes it’s not exactly unexpected that the more he looks at the figment of his insanity, the more insane he feels. Contrastingly, he becomes less and less aware of the chaos gradually brewing inside his head at its command, under the orchestration of its glare- that deeply aggravating and transfixing glare, that glare that makes his stomach turn and evokes something craving and possessive in him. It’s beautiful, horribly beautiful. Even the word beautiful doesn’t seem to suffice, it’s more like seductive. Perhaps not in the same way he might consider a human seductive, but that might be because he’s never encountered and human quite so seductive, or possibly even because he didn’t know what seductive _was_ until now.

By the end of the afternoon, John has been so drugged with an insufferable dosage of sexual frustration from the creature’s unnerving watch, when he notices it waiting for him only a few feet from him in the shallows, it’s as though he’s been possessed to come closer. He yearns to touch it, just to see if it’s real, to hold it, to have it. He thinks maybe it’s something about those compelling eyes, that glow like abyssal jellyfish. Tenuously, he takes a step, and then another into the wash of waves. Part of him can’t believe he’s actually walking **toward** the monster again, but he’s not afraid. Neither is the monster. It sits in the water, the setting sun turning its scales red, letting him approach, betraying no emotion. And then John steps within it’s grasp.

Its hand clamps around his ankle and tugs so he falls backwards onto his side, elbow digging into the sand. The fall seems to snap him out of whatever trance he was feeling, and his heart begins to pound in panic. He tries to pull himself further up the beach, straining for purchase, but he's pulled downward into the water, the soil spilling through his grasp. Dark water rushes around him, in his ears, his mouth. Underwater, he claws at the ground as he's dragged deeper, but the sand dissolves in his fingers.


	4. Chapter 4

By the time John comes up to air, it’s dark and he can’t see the island. Rain drizzles down on the surface and the black, frigid water churns with whiteheads. He breathes, wiped out with fatigue, having been under for over two minutes before the grip on his foot had finally eased.

As he treads water, his eyelids sagging with oxygen depletion, something brushes his foot. He doesn’t know whether he hopes it’s the monster or a shark. Preferably a small fish, but he can tell that’s not likely the case from the amount of water it displaced.

He swallows, quiets his breathing, and ties to make himself stop shivering. He strains his eyes to see through the opaque water and vaguely distinguishes some shadowy movement, a few fin flails, trailing around him in circles, indeed like a shark.

He tries to parse out its shifty form from the liquid black current, but can only catch glimpses, hints of something he's not even sure is there. His eyes start shifting frantically over the water in realization that the capabilities of his senses are simply insufficient, darting, sometimes in paranoia, sometimes with dreadful accuracy, to anything and everything he sees. His chest tightens.

Suddenly, out of no-where, it grips him and tugs him down. His arms flash out reflexively in alarm, bringing him back his former position, head above water.

His recovery is quick and the touch seemingly harmless, but it appears it was just an experimental touch. It comes back around his leg and a spark of shock runs up his spine. He flinches violently with a splash, before it’s dragging him down again, several feet.

John crawls back up to the surface and curses. He hates it, the waiting game, the not being able to see anything, the freaky element of surprise each attack brings. Most of all, he hates how he can’t catch a breath, which is naturally distressing. He’s perfectly defenseless like this and has never felt anything quite like it. There’s something inherently nerve-racking about looking, waiting for an ominous threat you can’t see, and also something despairingly helpless, but in his fear-induced fixation he is unable to tear his eyes away.

It falls quiet, whatever it was stops circling, falls away. John sighs a ragged breath, and revolves around in the water, searching for the direction of the island. The wind is in chaos and he can’t use that to his aid, and the sky is clouded over. He thinks perhaps it might be better to wait for the rain to pass before he starts swimming any which way, to avoid getting lost at sea. But dusk is not a good time to be in the water, when sharks come out to prowl, and he’s frankly just sitting fish-food out here.

Thanks to an opportune flash of static in the sky, John can discern a patch of rock penetrating the sky line 20 meters away. He seizes the opportunity and crawls toward it before he loses his orientation again. He only makes it about halfway though.

Another flash and he sees the shadow just in front of him. There’s a pang of panic at the sensation of it snagging his foot with rough, raw strength enough to make him feel though he’ll be torn apart, and he emits a startled yell before he’s choking on water. He plummets down for what seems like forever, water gushing against him so viciously fast, it feels as though the salt is scraping his skin. The grip doesn’t hurt, like a shark would. John is beginning to wish it did.

He tries to swim against it, kick free from its hold, but the forces are too powerful and dwarf his efforts. He feels like a rabbit with its foot caught in a snare.

And then, mercifully, it lets go, in what seems like a careless whim.

John feebly scrambles upward, at least what he thinks is upward, the dearth of oxygen in his chest growing. He doesn’t know how far up he needs to swim or if he can make it, and the fact that the monster is likely circling him doesn't exactly ease the increasing sense of desperation.

After a brief hiatus just long enough for it to grow bored, it tags him and drags him down again. John releases a frustrated scream, garbled by the water. He tears his foot away and it lets him struggle upward for a moment, before tugging him down again, and again, insidiously halving his progress, not making it fruitless, but maddeningly, unbearably slow. Each time, he feels like his heart is sinking in his chest. His lungs ache and contort with pain, his throat twisting with voiceless emotion.

He breaks the surface for a split second, and in that second it occurs to him, to his imminent horror, that the creature, the monster, is playing with him. It's a game of Tug of War.

Before he has the opportunity to take a breath, it pulls him back down. He hears his mind squirm with a whimper he can’t make. He knows the surface is whirl-pooling above, reaches for it with his hand, but the monster arrests his other hand, immobilizing him. John would shriek out of physical and emotional agony at the tastable closeness of respite, if only he had anything left in his lungs and his throat wasn’t powerlessly mute. He gnashes his teeth vexedly as a pinpoint touch runs along his crackling, failing nerves, trailing across his collarbone. Then partly to the dismay of his fading consciousness, the tension throughout his frame softens from the taming influence of the touch. He feels it run up his jugular and withers against the delicate yet pleasurable sensation of it, surrendering in spite the failing pressure in his head. It holds him down for what seems like a specific duration, then lets go.

He comes to the surface half-alive, but is soon gasping for breath rapidly and anxiously, not knowing whether to cry with relief or misery that he lives to die another moment. His heart leaps in his chest when his eyes catch the rock he’d been in the midst of a journey toward earlier. He tears after it, his muscles protesting the abuse, but operational under the fuel of adrenaline.

Only a few strokes from the oasis of dry land, a hand wraps around his foot and his eyes light up with confusion. He’s drawn underwater a few feet again, muscle-memory of the recent sensation of drowning inducing a feeling of dread.

“Stop it. Stop it. Please,” he hisses angrily, biting the water. With a flail of desperate, trapped-animal power he kicks free from the monsters grip, and touches his hands to the slope of rock. He inserts his digits into the crevices of its sheer slope, and pulls himself up.

In the midst of his ascent, he inevitably slips on the moist surface, teetering on the brink of falling back to the depths. But he responds well under pressure and gunpoint and things of that nature, so he manages to catch himself. He resumes scaling and soon makes it to the horizontal platform of the apex. He throws himself against one of the walls of its naturally-eroded canals, trying to regulate his panting and rationalize the receding panic.

But a wave of stormy ocean flattens over the stone, and his nerves jitter out of control again. His eyes flutter down to the blackness of the surrounding ocean, beginning to spiral around the circumference of the rock, like an ominous mixture stirring in a pot.  The rush of water whizzes around his ears with a hissing _sshhh_.

“H-hey. Hey. Hello. My name is..” the water murmurs over the rush, to John’s absolute disbelief.

“You’re another person,” it chimes in faux, exaggerated relief, and John’s throat tightens in recognition of his own words, “Oh thank God!”

John’s eyes widen, because he detects a note of amusement, of sarcasm in the multifaceted voice.

“I think I’m lost. Do you think you could help me? My name is..” the vortex trills confusedly.

John shudders a sigh, completely convinced his mind is playing tricks on him now. A sane man knows talking water doesn’t exist. “Stop talking.”

“Stop talking.”

“Stop—“

“Stop it!” it shouts, and John feels his back slam backward into the stone.

John stares at the opening vortex with dark, bottomless eyes, panting anxiously. “What do you want?” John deplores raggedly.

“What do I want.. What do I want?" It laughs, like he's being absurd, "I want _you_ , John."

John shivers at the response, feeling sick. He feels light headed and leans a hand on the rock. “No,” he croaks.

“No, what?”

“I’m not coming back in—“ he insists tiredly.

“Where?”

“Into the water! You tried to kill me,” he states coldly. The torrent of water is racing, gushing at its maximal speed, sounding like the crush of a waterfall.

“Oh— No, come in. I won’t kill you, I don’t want to kill you—” the current replies tenderly, and John feels unnerved. The words he says are ammunition, manipulation thrown back at him by some unknown invisible force, parroting him with increasingly apparent ingenuity, “Come back into the water. Come into the water, John Watson.” 

Hearing the implicit smile in its tone, John feels his nerves give way, his legs buckle, and he leans his head against the cold granite limply. He forces his eyes closed despite the nagging dread, breathing measured breaths that are revving to leap forward out of his control and hyperventilate.

“Don’t you want to John?”


	5. Chapter 5

_“Cap!”_

There’s a shot from behind, unremarkable in every way, excluding the fact it’s the last one he hears. And then there’s the nerve endings, exploding like fireworks. The sound of them snapping.

_“Cap’n –-an you hear me?” a far-away voice asks. It seems worried._

_“Hey, hey, come on,” the voice wavers vulnerably, like it’s wrestling with itself._

_“John!” it shrieks._

John’s eyes snap open and he bolts up, finding himself on a boulder jutting out of the water. His shoulder burns with tenderness and his hand reflexively grips the source of the pain. He grimaces, leaning his head back against the rock with a deep, disgruntled sigh.

He sits with his back uncomfortably pressed to a wall of rock, registering his surroundings and getting his bearings. Daybreak. The island shore beckons a few kilometers away, skirted by a tame, deep blue sea. Gentle waves rock the shore beneath the coursing wind, which plays at his disheveled grey hair.

His bold blue eyes stare straight ahead at the island, temple flexing, jaw rearranging the taste of mineral salt in his mouth. His mouth flattens into a defiant frown and he stands.

Intrepidly, he steps up and dives forward, piercing the water with arms aligned to a vertex.  There’s a brazen quality about him, nerves of steel. As he glides forward, froth torrents in a halo around his form for all underwater onlookers to see. He draws a stroke and then another, whiteheads clapping against his forefront. He uses his shoulder on and off and tries to compartmentalize the seeping pain.

John realizes he’s actually farther out than he expected. Looking across the vast expanse, the notion that anything could cross the distance in one breath seems purely fantastical to John now, and he seriously doubts the obscure memories he has of a mermaid dragging him out here in the darkness; it was much more realistically the riptide. He remembers seeing the creature, and thinks about it constantly enough while swimming that he begins recalling recalls instead of the original memories. The more he thinks about it critically, however, the more convinced he is that the mermaid is a complete work of fiction, a fairytale and not even an original one. And the voices from the water were, well, very obviously a cry for mental help. He really ought to get himself checked.

The pain steps up a notch, testing his threshold, but John can’t afford to stop, he knows that. Perhaps he underestimated the amount damage to his shoulder, must've been on a painkiller regiment beforehand that's starting to wear thin. In any case, he doesn’t have a choice, he has to work with it and get to that infernal death-trap island if he wants to live.

That plan is shot when the shoulder starts throwing a fit, screaming indignantly that it is indeed, a fracture; a deafeningly-loud, vision-blurring, and just insufferable injury that refuses to compromise. He falters with a startled gasp, his hand clenching on his upper arm and imprinting his fingers into his bicep.

He’s trying to breathe but also trying not to scream, contemplating what to do. He looks around for another platform of rock to rest at, feeling like he’s going to pass out. The nearest rock is several metres away, but he comes to the realisation he can’t even make it there. He can’t take another stroke, can’t move, without the shoulder joint screaming.

The blood has drained from his face. He feels himself slipping, just barely able to keep his head above. His blueish, parted lips are just barely over the waterline, vying for oxygen, and his eyelashes are closed tight, willing the pounding reverberations to stop.

And then. The now-familiar sensation of something slithering implicatively along the arch of his foot races up his spine again, like electricity on a wire. A tenuous smile flickers on the edge of his mouth and he scoffs almost disbelievingly at the predictability of it. The pain dulls his awareness, renders him helpless, even makes him sink beyond his ability to rectify, so he’s fully confident he has no means of escape but isn’t as properly concerned as he might be.

And then something clamps down on his foot. There’s a look of transparent surprise on his face, a too-late realization he was mistaken, when he feels that it hurts. The sensation is very much unlike the smooth-planed, iron grip from the night prior, comprised of sharp, biting incisions, like a jar of razor blades. John releases a ragged sob of breath he’s unable to hold in, choking on the spike of pain so far above his threshold. His stomach lurches with pent-up anxiety and aggravation.

He notices a flood of burgundy emanating from underwater, brewing like a storm. It drifts up in pints, soaking his clothes, its thick, suffocating scent permeating his nose and mouth. Violent colour mixes in the water, intensifying, until John is practically swimming in it, gagging on the taste of it. It feels so surreal, perfectly fantastical, like everything else, but the pain is too real to be a dream.

He sees a dorsal fin flash in his peripheral vision and veer towards him, intoxicated by the iron-rich scent, followed by another fin, and then another, and then three more. He feels cold, clammy, wanting for breath. His vision goes dark and the last thing he feels is the screaming ligamennts of his shoulder.

_Foggy voices at play, bickering it sounds like. One is emotional, wavering, the other grainy with static interference, electrically transmitted._

_“Soldier, what are you doing in an air strike zone and why are you using your captain’s line?”_

_“Our captain,” the less commanding voice says, “Our captain is down, major.”_

_“Oh, alright, you've got a man down. Brilliant.” the radio replies with a flare of dark humour, “Lemme add that to the list.”_

_“What do I do?” the voice seems at a loss, realising radio won’t hold off on the strike._

_“Oh for Christ’s sake,” the radio snaps, “Get him to a bloody medic!”_

_“No, he, he_  is  _the medic.”_

 _“Tell me, corporal,” the radio says in a conversational tone, “What are you in this for? Did you enlist because you liked the commercials?_ _You wanted to be a hero, earn yourself a medal of valour?” the radio asks teasingly._

_“What?” the soldier fails to process._

_“Save him or leave him, just remember a medal is a scrap piece of bloody metal and your life is your life. You have two minutes and 3 seconds. Get the hell out of that war path.”_

_The static clicks off as the line is severed._

_“Go Murray,” John manages to make his vocal chords flex._

_“Captain-“_

_He interrupts him impatiently. “ **Go**. That's an order.” _

 

_John inexplicably finds himself back on the outskirts beach, fully intact, clueless as to how he got there. “Blood. There was…” he hears himself say, trying to piece together what happened. But his mind drags slow like he’s still sleeping. He sees the creature is sitting across from him on a slab of limestone in the shallows, framed by the placid blue wash of waves, looking as though it’s been waiting there a while._

_“Did you… did you see what happened?” John asks dazedly, trying to focus on it. The creature flips its tail lackadaisically, looking bored. Its chin rests on its overlapped hands lethargically, elbows bent and outstretched._

_“Did I.. did I really faint?” John wonders, attention drifting to curiously at the sand. He tries to remember who he’s talking to, turning back to the vacant patch of rock across from him. He’s confused._

 

Then he wakes up again, coming to with sunlight is peaking through his eyelids. His eyes blink open and he shields his eyes with his arm, pupils contracting in the blaze of high noon. He sits up and sees that he still has two legs, though his left pant leg is torn into rows of welts, consistent with a shark bite. A very gentle shark bite. Either it was being considerate or it got interrupted.

His eyes dart forward on some vaguely coherent impulse, but there’s nothing to see, besides a lapping waterline and a few sparse rocks. Mind games.


	6. Chapter 6

The creature sits perched amongst the asteroid belt of sea rocks, watching the human from a distance. He watches John wake, confused and disoriented after the brief spell of unconsciousness. It’s at a loss, clueless, struggling to make sense of anything.

It’s surprising, the level of incomprehension, this from the species that named itself for being the smartest. Finally it looks around, but it appears its vision is equally poor. It does not detect an ulterior presence, and the creature does not reveal himself to it, so eventually it gives up trying out reconstruct what happened, reverting to its machinations along the beach.

The creature presides over John’s activity from the remote recesses of his stone fortress, intrigued and very much engaged in its efforts but keeping a distance so as to allow its labours to proceed uninterrupted. The human seems to be amassing an obscene amount of wood, for what purpose the sea creature can only fathom a guess. There is no rhyme or reason to the structure, it’s perfectly chaotic, and yet despite the lack of form, it must certainly have a function, he has no doubt of that.

John continues, fixated on his task, and the creature watches in complete awe of human frailty, observing the building mystery accumulate bit by manageable bit. His mind reels at the thought of how something so fragile can function. It had _fainted_ from pain during shark lunch hour. He remembers the way it's head fell so indolent and entrusting against his shoulder, wanting for breath. He’d never encountered an animal so poorly designed- how it had not been wiped out by natural selection already was a marvel.

Finally the creature's questions are in part answered, but rather to his disappointment. When the structure bursts alight with flame just before nightfall, it's extremely anticlimactic. He rolls his eyes sardonically, completely unsurprised. What was he expecting? This is what humans do. Set fire to things. Perhaps they find it cathartic. They have, on rare occasion, even set fire to the ocean.

The chimera watches the woodcraft burn thoughtfully, eyebrows furrowing. It very prominently announces the human’s presence to the rest of the island, and is likely to attract land predators, if there are any within the confines of the island. He decides it is best to stand watch over the human for the night, when it elects to sleep, because one thing is readily apparent, John is much more entertaining alive than dead.


	7. Chapter 7

_“_ _What the fuck are you doing?" John_ _remarks_ _upon walking into the tent._

_"Did you want to play?" Reynolds asks, in a tone that could be prefaced by ‘how rude of me..’._

_"Play?" John remarks in fascination, amazed by the brazen response. He's just walked in on what looks like his squad playing the clinically insane excursion known as Russian roulette, and their first instinct is to ask him if he wants to play._

_"Yeah.” As if he's done nothing wrong!_

_"You're asking me if I want to play shoot-myself-in-the-head with you?" John replays the thought, letting the stupidity of their request weigh in the air._

_"Lighten up, Cap. Everyone does it," Lars grins and John clenches his jaw, not amused by the nickname. He mentally files through the list of sarcastic comments he has for that, among them "If your friends jumped off a bridge" and “surprise everyone’s not dead then.”_

_"What else are we supposed to do for kicks?" Reynolds asks. Actually. He actually asks that. John glares at them with a haughty, frustrated look that manages to say I am a doctor, I am your doctor, I am the captain responsible for all of your lives— no I’m not going to let you to play this game and most certainly will not play it **with** you. But that does not dent the shimmering hope in their eyes, like insolent schoolboys with audacity enough to even think of raising the question they’re asking._

_All of them look at him with bright, beautiful admiration, awaiting his response. John stares them down silently, an arm-crossed pillar of condemnation, but then suddenly, feeling particularly inspired, does a one eighty._

_“Alright,” he says gamely, joining them on the floor of the tent. All the masks of false innocence drop and the six of them are visibly surprised, speechless and slack-jawed. Murray, the greenhorn, exchanges looks with Fischer._

_“Go ahead,” John says indicating the python revolver Lars is holding. This is all new territory for them. John can tell from the way Lars hesitates._

_The onlookers wait in suspense, wondering what’s going to give. Tasked with doing the honors, Lars dualy points the barrel at his forehead, and John stares down the silver, eight-inch shaft. The inside is smooth, stainless steel, no grooves, vanishing into the black of the chamber._

_He closes his eyes, feeling the rim press against his head. The grip of fear is tactile, the involuntary clenching of teeth, the sound of shuddery breath, but he manages to remain in control of it rather than let it control him, his nerve doing a number on Lars’s, who looks like he’s looking for any excuse not to shoot._

_Murray feels compelled to end it because the captain isn’t, and finally caves as the trigger slides back under Lars’ index finger._

_“Tom don’t-” Murray starts, reaching for the gun, but Reynolds intercepts him before he can and its too late._

_The revolver clicks, the chamber empty._

_John lets out a breath, feeling light-headed._

_A silence comes over the squad, uncertain of how to gauge their new captain— bold, intrepid, or insane. It’d been the prank that they pull on all the new recruits. The gun wasn’t loaded and he had called their bluff, putting a stop to the idiocy worthy of court-martial._

_But he could never forget that breath-taking feeling, staring down the length of a gun._

_The dual thrill and terror of the gamble,_

_the not knowing the contents of the other end be it blank or bullet,_

_only the empty bottomlessness of the barrel,_ _and the way steel-rimmed purgatory filled his field of vision._

 

John wakes up grouchy seeing that the beacon has expended its supply of firewood and, as apparent from the deserted horizon line, succeeded in garnering no one’s attention whatsoever. What remains of the smoke signal is distorted by the sweep of oceanic wind.

He shifts up and flops back down, grunting at the recurring pain in his shoulder which seems to grow more vindictive by the hour, and wishes momentarily that he had some of the military grade morphine he used to hand out so liberally.

Walking against the wind, dusty and sharp with sand fragments, he wanders along the shore in search of more tinder. His search turns into a long one, taking him to the more distant reaches of the island, having already cleared most of the nearby surroundings. The island is mostly chaparral, which makes his task all the more tedious, scavenging for what little remaining foliage it has to offer.

The sun ascends overhead as day break turns to mid morning, white rays bearing down on the dry, barren landscape, and the beach opens into a bay with cliffs looming in the distance. He approaches the waterline and glances over a bluff obscuring the bank, where he sees something breaking the waves. Squinting in the light but unable to discern what it is, he moves toward it, boots peddling in the sand for traction.

Upon closer inspection, he sees what appears to be carnage, badly mangled, having washed up on the shore. And then he sees the countless rows of white teeth and the pit of his stomach sinks, twisting into knots. His skin crawls even as he tries to push the creeping sensation 'you know what did this' to the back of his mind.

He turns away, pointedly not looking back. His mind is scrambling to understand how that could have happened. He tries to think about other things, like that sharks attack other sharks in a feeding frenzy, that a killer whale could do something like that if it wanted. But the state it was in- a great white ripped to shreds in the most animalistic of fashions, to a point beyond recognition. 

He heads further upwind, until inevitably he’s confronted with barren, eroded cliffs resisting the battery of chaotic waves. He stalls and looks out into the horizon. Just off the continental shelf the water is patterned with the scaly textures of underwater seaweed forests, which would be easy to dry and burn instead, but he humbly opts out of another venture into the waves. 

He manages to convince himself that the notion of shark-eating men is ridiculous. And backwards. And that even the most horrific depictions of mermaids in folklore don't do that. But the thought stirs up a vague memory, something from a myth, fairy tale, or dream, of sinister, siren-like creatures that pull sailors under and drag them to their deaths.

He remembers the thrill of a shiver when those long, human-like fingers had closed around him, the dismal, nightmarish canvas of cold blue tones with bubbles that trail upward, the memory of salt burning against his eyes, but he shakes it off as a fantasy. Certainly he would be dead, if that game of life or death had been anything more than a dream.

The gentle breeze and reassuring waves calm him and he tries to forget the insidious machinations of his mind, thinking of other things less morbid. He doubles back along the coastline, his ventures uneventful, and the morning lags on. 

His mouth feels dry by the time he returns to the beacon, but he ploughs past his canteen in interest of finding tinder downwind. He sees that the desert-scape gives way to eucalyptus and olive trees, not more than a quarter mile out across a shallow inlet. As he walks toward the waterline, he suddenly goes still.

Something, no, he recognizes it perfectly well-- the chimera, lays nestled along the dunes, slumbering in broad daylight. It looks oddly human from the waist up, lying on it’s stomach with forearms braced above its head like an idle sunbather. Seeing it a mere few paces away, much too close for comfort, it occurs to him that perhaps he should back up, when its eyes flicker open and the glowing green irises that make John’s heart stutter lock onto him.

The slow way it rises onto its forearms is decidedly feline and the lion-like resemblance doesn’t exactly help with the feeling like he’s on the wrong side of the fence at the zoo.

He swallows when it makes the first move toward him, one hand stroking through the sand, the other crossing over gracefully in front, with the slinky, rolling shoulders of a jaguar pawing through desert. And then there's an cursory, even polite pause, as if to say "aren't you going to run?"

He is considerably less seamless in his movements. He fumbles and falls backward, helpless and completely disoriented in the blaze of its eyes. John can hardly find the words for the way it's looking at him, half bored-half curious, all poise and killer instinct, mesmerizing like staring into fire and arresting like the glare of a blue-blooded cobra.

It crawls toward him, impossibly graceful and unhurried in its movements, and he fumbles like a poor insect caught in a web, digging his heels in and back-pedaling in the gravel, sand shunting in all directions.

It crawls over his legs, arms on either side of his waist, and John gives up, stopping his futile struggles. He watches helplessly as it moves over his body, out of some bored whim, just because it can. It leans nearer until they are face to face and it's eyes peer into his, catching his breath.

He stares into its eyes, the way that the irises, alight with fluorophores, open into blackness, and he’s instinctively reminded of what it looks like, staring down the barrel of a gun.


	8. Chapter 8

Its face is a slate wiped blank: indecipherable, unperturbable, paralyzing—its head cocked in a way that makes him swallow dryly. It's like a cross between a runway model and the _Terminator_ , and John has no idea whether that makes it more or less unnerving.

  
There’s a sharpness to its gaze that shouldn’t be there. As it leans forward it sets John on edge— the way its eyes cut into him him with an incisiveness that seems to convey its mind is just as sharp as it teeth, implicative of that silent, deadly weapon— intellect— and a more volatile, passionate nature smoldering beneath the surface, like fire tiptoeing around gasoline.

 

What appears to be a hint of annoyance flickers in its eyes, darkening on its features and casting shadows on its face, deepening into a look of frustration. Its eyes become as ominous as they are enigmatic, malcontent with inexplicability- as if he were as unexplainable to _it_ as _it_ is to _him_. They burn with a dangerous kind of curiosity, boring into his soul like a Pandora’s box of destructive potential waiting to be unleashed, harboring paradoxes that make him want to shake his head in incomprehension. They seem as if to ask how can you be as close as possible and still not close enough?

 

His mind scrambles to think what it could mean by that kind of look, his eyes frantically searching that blaze of emerald green, but part of him knows he’s playing stupid, trying to contain the gnawing feeling that he already knows what it wants, all too familiar with that kind of look to not recognize it when he sees it.

 

After all, it’s only appropriate to ask a question if you want to know the answer.

And it's only a question if the answer isn’t part of the question.

 

What can it mean— it’s a stupid question. It can only mean there is something even closer: what lies in wait on the other side his pupils, where the light scatters across the back of his eyes, where the fibers combine into the ocular nerve and the wires cross in front of his brain, traversing to the back of his head. It’s not the kind of closer that naturally occurs to those who favor themselves fully intact and in one piece.

 

It wants to take him apart, like any other routine cadaver dissection for educational purposes, only _he_ would be the body. He watches it contemplating it— deliberating his fate— entertaining the idea of tearing him into unrecognizable bits and pieces, which it has all the power to do. He watches it wrestling with itself, unable to resist the temptation, growing more impatient as time ticks and the odds stack against him.

 

He hears the rumble in its throat break out into a growl and feels the thin ice beneath him begin to crumble. His eyelids flutter closed and in the darkness he can hear his pulse hammering against his eardrums. A little voice in the back of his head starts canting prayers, what little sanity he has left exercising its brittle grip over the mounting panic threatening to break loose.

 

_Please don't. Please don't kill me._

_I'm not a rag doll._

_Not a life-size chew toy either—_

_Please don’t rip me apart like you did that shark._

_I’m human. Human— if that means anything to you._

 

He’s a trainwreck of uncontrollable shakes and shivers, a tear of excitement tracing down his cheek.

 

 _I_ _wish_ _I_ _wasn’t_ _bargaining_ _with_ _a_ _wild_ _animal_ , _or_ _mythical_ _creature_ , _or_ _figment_ _of_ _my_ _imagination_ , _nightmares_ _or_ _madness_ , _whatever_ _it_ _is_ _you_ _are_ ,

 _but_ _I_ _am_ , _so_ ,  _while_ _its_ _the_ _last_ _place_ _I’d_ _like_ _to_ _be_ _right now_ , 

 _I’m_ _at_ _your_ _mercy_.  _That_ _is_ , _assuming_   _you_ _have_ _any_ —

 

A startled yell, the sound of his own voice, fills his ears at the sudden moment of its darting forward. His scream is cut short by a shortage of breath, what feels like a choke hold or a knot in his chest. He braces himself, waiting for the moment of impact, but it never comes.

After the flood of terror has subsided, he can feel himself still breathing.

  
It stopped. Only a fraction of a second before it would have sliced his carotid and reduced him to a puddle of six liters blood on sand, it stopped. Perhaps on a whim, spur of thought, change of heart, who knows.

  
He sits there, its fangs hovering above his neck, and counts the milliseconds, trying not to move or make a fatal error. He exhales slowly, trying to stop himself from acting out in an irrational way. He begins to wish it had just gotten it over with and instead of playing with him in this sort of cruel waiting game.

Just when he feels as though he can’t handle it anymore, it withdraws, for some reason deterred.

He's shaking head to foot, struck by how real all of it feels, although in staring back at the monster that is so far beyond what his mind is willing to believe, his mind gives up on trying to understand, rejecting the idea that any of it could be, for all intensive purposes, real or actually happening.


End file.
